All of us think that the way we bring up our children is correct and that the way everyone else brings up their children is completely wrong. They’re too strict. Too lax. Too open. Too closed. Too heterosexual. No one gets it as right as you do. And that’s the thing. Bringing up a child is personal, and there is really no space in the nature and nurture debate for a bunch of frizzy-haired lunatics running around making political points at our expense about lesbians. If the government is looking for savings, it should think very hard about disbanding an organization that tells people what to tell parents.
There are many things I need to know that I do not. How to contact someone at Facebook. How to get to Bournemouth when the main road is closed for a worm-removal programme. If the government provided advice on these things, that would be wonderful. But instead it tells me what time my daughter should go to bed at night and what she should have for breakfast. And how she would grow up to be a more rounded human being if only my wife would invite a girlfriend round for the night and slip into something see-through.
Yes, there are fat women in the north who need to be told their kids may not skip school and experiment with crystal meth until they are at least eight. But we already have an organization in place to deal with this sort of thing: it’s called the police. And if the police are unable to help, we have another. It’s called social services. Social workers go in, see the child is off its head on heroin and all covered in sick, and put it in a home. You don’t need a national academy telling them what sort of home it should be because it’s blindingly obvious to anyone with half a brain.
This is the problem we face here. I don’t like the idea that lesbians, even the weird, big sort in dungarees, should be excluded from adopting a baby. They grew up with a predilection for members of the same genital group but that doesn’t stop them being good parents. Banning a lesbian from parenting would be as cruel as banning someone because they had an interest in golf, which is what I’d do if I were in charge. Or because they had ginger hair. However, I’m afraid we must think about the children. Having two mums, whether you like it or not, is going to cause a spot of bother in the playground. But that’s just my view and I’m only a parent. What do I know?
Sunday 22 November 2009
I’m so dead – shot by both sides in the website war
As you may know, Rupert Murdoch and his son James are engaged in a bitter dispute with the BBC over all sorts of things. This puts me in a tricky spot. Obviously, Rupert and James Murdoch are my bosses, not just here at the Sunday Times but also at the Sun, for which I write a column on Saturdays. I am therefore inclined to nod vigorously when they suggest the licence fee should be scrapped and all BBC web activities halted forthwith. But I am also employed by the BBC, which means I am inclined to nod vigorously whenever the director-general says the BBC is a fantastic institution and the envy of every nation in the world. This means I’ve been doing an awful lot of vigorous nodding in the past few months.
It’s not just sycophancy either. I really do believe that both sides have a point. If you are paying your licence fee, you should be entitled to view the programmes you funded on whatever platform happens to suit your mood and lifestyle. If you wish to watch the news on your mobile phone and Autumnwatch on your computer, then it is the BBC’s duty to make that possible. But that puts all newspapers, not just this one, in a difficult position. Running a website is ferociously expensive. I see the bills for the Top Gear site and it makes my eyes explode. And, of course, while it is possible to meet some of that cost with advertising, it should be remembered that every penny earned by the website is a penny in lost revenue for the printed newspaper.
The only realistic solution is to make people pay to see the site. But who’s going to do that when the BBC is providing a news service for nothing? We therefore face the real possibility of various newspapers going out of business, which, combined with the problems at ITV and Channel 4, could mean the BBC becomes the only newsgathering organization in the country. This would be an extremely bad thing.
Of course, the two main political parties have massively oversimplified the debate. You have Jeremy Hunt for the Tories saying he’s going to execute everyone at the BBC and put their heads on spikes. And Ben Bradshaw for Labour saying he’s going to execute everyone at News International. Either way, I’m going to be killed. Which is why I have been examining the argument carefully and I’ve decided that the biggest issue in all of this is the internet. It’s a monster. An invisible machine over which mankind has absolutely no control. We can’t even turn it off.
Let us start by listing the good things it has achieved. Well, er, it is now possible to find out where James Garner was born without going to the library and order your Sunday lunch without going to the shops. And there are some jolly funny things on YouTube.
But now let’s look at some of the bad things. Well, your children are being bullied mercilessly on Facebook and there is no one you can contact to have the bullying stopped; your husband is spending most of his evenings baring his private parts to some Ukrainian girl; your wife has rekindled a childhood romance; the twin towers have been knocked down; Stephen Fry has been driven to the edge of another breakdown; you have to spend half your day answering pointless e-mails; there is unimaginable cruelty in almost every blog, where the rules of defamation seem not to apply; and James Garner was not born, as suggested on one site, in Chicago.
It gets worse. Only a few weeks ago my colleague James May scuttled off into a Romanian wood to have a pee; the event was captured on a phone and now it’s on the internet. And there is absolutely nothing he can do to have it taken off. These are just the minor issues, the annoyances. The big problem is just round the corner: the bankrupting of everyone in the world of film, art, literature, news and music. The fact is this. If something can be digitized, it can be stolen. You record a song, you sell one copy, it goes on the internet and it will be nicked. If you write a book, the same thing can happen. Newspapers, magazines, films, jokes, music: all of it can be, and is being, circulated for nothing, which means the person who wrote and prepared and slaved over the original product is not being paid. That’s not so bad if you are ten and you’ve posted some mobile phone footage of your friend pulling funny faces on YouTube. But if you are running Paramount Pictures, it is very bad indeed.
I do not know how much it cost to make this year’s surprising hit comedy The Hangover, but it will have been several million dollars. None of that will have been recouped at the box office because the film stars no one you’ve ever heard of. But word of mouth means that some of the cash could be clawed back in DVD sales. ’Fraid not. Because this film is extremely popular with internet-savvy teenagers, it is being downloaded for nothing at an alarming rate. And, speaking as the host of the most illegally downloaded TV show in the world, I know how annoying this can be. It’s why I’ve explained to my kids that they can smoke, drink and push old ladies into boating lakes. But if they steal a song or a film, I will make them live in the chicken run for a year.
Sadly, I’m alone. Your kids are nicking things on an industrial scale. They have been brought up to expect everything for nothing on the web and they simply cannot understand why they should use money they need for mobile phone calls to pay for something that is available free.
I do not think there is a solution to this. Companies can build in as many electronic safeguards as they like but the fact is this: somewhere out there in cyberland there is a geek who can pick his way through the electronic locks and steal the booty.
The debate, then, is not whether the BBC should be allowed to peddle its warnings of global doom on the internet. It’s how you control a monster that seemingly cannot be controlled at all.
Sunday 29 November 2009
Sing about the fat man again and I’ll shoot Tiny Tim
In the olden days, before the Christmas No 1 slot was invariably bagged by the winner of Simon Cowell’s annual karaoke competition, there was always a mad scramble among
record companies and artistes to bang a big one in the yuletide goal. This brings me directly to Bob Dylan’s first seasonal album – Christmas in the Heart. Well, it had to be in the heart, didn’t it, because it wasn’t very likely to happen in his synagogue.
I suppose I ought to mention before we begin that Dylan is not my favourite recording artist. Or my second-favourite. In fact, he is my 2,507th favourite recording artist, just after Pinky and Perky. Some say he is the heart of modern music. But I don’t think he’s even the stomach lining. He’s just an annoying wart on the gall bladder of rock’n’roll. Certainly, I’d never tire of flushing everything he’s written or recorded down the lavatory. Even when he’s doing a happy song, he always manages to sound so bloody miserable, like a widower trying to be cheerful at his wife’s funeral. And when he’s being down in the dumps, which is usually, I can’t understand why he would want to inflict his bad mood on everyone else. If I want to feel sad, I’ll poison my donkeys. It’d be better than listening to Bob droning on.
But that’s enough about Bob, because while listening to the chief miserablist’s awful collection of Christmas songs, one of which seems to suggest that one of Santa’s reindeers is called Clinton, I began to wonder what had been the worst Christmas song of all time.
Bob, we must remember, is by no means the first big-name star to take the yuletide shilling and bash something out for the world’s Xmas stockings. Who, for instance, can forget Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town’ or Madonna’s ‘Santa Baby’ or John Denver’s ‘Please, Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas)’. Quite something from a man who had two drink-driving arrests to his name.
But the winner of the Surely You Don’t Need the Money award must be Ringo Starr for his 1999 collection of Christmas songs, one of which, I seem to recall, contained the lyric: ‘It’s been around since you know when.’ Er, didn’t ‘the year dot’ rhyme? The worst? Well, obviously, you have to consider Boney M’s syrupy ‘Mary’s Boy Child’ and ‘When a Child Is Born’ by Johnny Mathis. But for me, it will always be Bing’s dreadful ‘White Christmas’.
I accept of course that we need a constant supply of new Christmas records because the old ones become turgid and dull. ‘Silent Night’, for instance, is a monstrously dreary hit from yesteryear, and if I hear ‘Away in a Manger’, I’m filled with a sometimes uncontrollable need to kill myself. I will also accept that some of the more recent offerings have been very fine. Slade’s ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’ is nearly boisterous enough to get me dancing and is, with hindsight, just good enough to have kept Wizzard’s ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday’ off the top spot in 1973. I also admit to a fondness for Greg Lake’s ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’, although I know that owning up to that is like owning up to a fondness for child molestation. And I still like to hear Chris Rea’s ‘Driving Home for Christmas’. Then we have the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl, whose ‘Fairytale of New York’ I ought to hate as heartily as I hated Bryan Adams’s stupid ‘Reggae Christmas’. But I don’t.
Mostly, though, Christmas songs are dreadful for a very good reason. The story on which they are all based only really works if you have the mental age of a four-year-old. It is possible to write songs about love, breaking up, getting back together and – in country music, anyway – breaking up again. Just after your dog dies. And your pick-up truck breaks down. You can write songs about a bohemian rhapsody and the dark side of the moon, but you cannot really write a song about what most people think is a bit of a fairy tale. Not if you want to emerge from the release with any dignity.
The notion that Springsteen, that hard, blue-collar chap who normally sings about broken heroes on a last-chance power drive, can be even remotely convincing while singing about a fat man on an airborne sledge is utterly nonsensical.
It’s the same story with the nativity. The virgin birth. The wise men. This is where Boney M went wrong. One minute, they were singing about an extraordinary figure from the Russian revolution. And the next, about a bunch of shepherds who came down from the hills to find a bloke in a stable explaining that his wife had just given birth to the son of God. Basing songs on goblins and mystical figures in the woods is fine in prog rock and in the primary-school classroom. But in the mainstream? On the radio? Over your breakfast? No.
It’s why I was glad when Bob Geldof and Midge Ure blasted their Band Aid hit into our consciousness. Because this was not a song about the baby Jesus or some fat bloke on a sleigh. It was about how we should feel towards others over the Christmas period. Which is somehow a bit more relevant.
Weirdly, and I’m not admitting to liking it, Cliff Richard achieved the same sort of thing with his hit ‘Mistletoe and Wine’.
The trouble is that if we’d continued down this route, Christmas songs would have stopped being happy and bouncy. They’d have become hectoring. Pretty soon, we’d have ended up with Muse urging us to buy the Big Issue and Kasabian asking us to share our turkey with a tramp. Nobody wants that sort of nonsense when we’re cruising the streets looking for a Go Go Hamster.
And that’s why we should all be grateful to Cowell’s karaoke competition. Because the winner’s guaranteed Christmas No 1 is also guaranteed not to be about Christmas.
Sunday 13 December 2009
The BA strike is off – so that’s many a Christmas ruined
I can’t believe that British Airways’ cabin crew thought it might be a good idea to go on strike. It seems so old-fashioned. Like banging the side of your television to stop the picture juddering, or getting a new penny in your Christmas stocking.
I remember well my first day at work. I walked through the door, turned round and went on strike. I had no idea why. But it didn’t seem unusual in the least. Back in 1978, no one ever actually went inside their office or factory. They stood outside, round a brazier, throwing stones at policemen for amusement.
I suppose we were all a lot stupider in those days, unwise in the ways of the world. We didn’t realize that if the company that employed us to stand outside all day had lost £400m the previous year, it couldn’t very well afford to give us all a 3,000 per cent pay rise and some scented logs for the brazier. That’s why I was so amazed about the BA nonsense. I can’t imagine for a minute that those pretty boys who point at doors for a living wanted to spend their Christmas break in donkey jackets, chanting: ‘Willie, Willie, Willie. Out, out, out.’ They might have thought it’d be nostalgic and fun to throw a stone at a policeman and call a pilot a scab. But if they’d all turned up for picket-line duty in their Audi TTs – the car of choice for cabin crew – I doubt they would have got many honks of support from passing motorists. They’d have just been rather cold and bored.
Of course, the courts decided on Thursday that you can’t really go on strike in 2009, any more than you can beat your whippet to death with a burning effigy of Margaret Thatcher. And this, I’m sure, will be a great relief to the many thousands of people who were looking forward to a bit of sunshine over the yuletide break. Strangely, though, I don’t see why … I once went away for Christmas and it was terrible, because not only do you have to pack all the usual assortment of holiday rubbish – shorts, sun cream and 8,500 battery chargers – but also you have to think about all the presents you’ll be handing out on Christmas morning. Packing is already the worst thing in the world – after being executed, and trying on a pair of trousers in a shop – but when you also have to pack the chrysanthemums you bought as a present for your wife from the petrol station, and 8,500 more battery chargers for all the kids’ new toys, it’s a bloody nightmare. You have to go to the airport in a lorry.
And then, when you get to whatever godforsaken hellhole the travel agent has recommended, the weather is all wrong. Even in Australia they send seasonal cards with robins on them, and all of us know that Jesus was born in a blizzard. It’s a fact. That’s why the shepherds came down from the hills. Because they wanted to get warm.
Have you ever tried singing ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’
when it’s 90°F in the shade? It’s as wrong as playing ‘The Birdie Song’ at a funeral. Or singing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ while watching Manchester United.
Christmas abroad confuses the hell out of young children as well. The hotel I stayed at in the Caribbean laid on a special treat, with Santa coming down the drive in a horse and cart. But the lack of antlers and skis was not what baffled my five-year-old most of all. ‘Daddy,’ she squeaked, ‘Santa’s all brown.’
You try explaining your way out of that one. ‘Yes, well, I know that Santa at home is a drunken white paedophile who hangs around in shopping centres with a tent pole in his trousers but here he’s called Winston and he’s er … er …’ There’s a much bigger problem, though, with the other people you encounter while on a Christmas break. In short, they are almost all very nasty, and there’s a good reason for this.
Think about it. At this time of year, there are many parties. People are in a convivial mood and everyone’s welcome. The roads are full of happy, cheery people whizzing from drinks do to lunch at the pub with mates. And then: ‘Sorry, we’ve got to go; we’re at the Fotheringtons’ tonight …’ The only reason you might choose to go away and miss all this is that you haven’t been invited to anything. And the only reason you haven’t been invited is that no one likes you. Ipso facto every single person who goes away at Christmastime is either a dullard or extremely unpleasant. And that means the hotel bar will be a complete no-go area.
On my one and only Christmas holiday, while I waited for my silly drink with an umbrella in it, I was approached by a man who spent an hour reeling off Aston Martin chassis numbers. I thought for the first thirty minutes I might kill myself. And then for the next thirty that it’d be better for all concerned if I killed him. I didn’t, which means this Christmas he’s still out there, lurking behind a pot plant with his adenoids and sandals. And because the courts have said the BA staff must work, you might be meeting him. You will also be trying to stuff down six sheets of roast turkey and gravy shortly after a dust devil has left it coated with a veneer of sand.
How Hard Can It Be? Page 25
